PSIG News: November 2004 e-News
November 15, 2004

November Meeting

The The November PSIG meeting will be held on Thursday the 18th, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at Voorhees High School in room 245. There will be a question-and-answer session and we will continue to look at some of Scott Kelby’s “Down and Dirty Photoshop Tricks” training movies. Members are encouraged to bring their images, prints, and questions for discussion during the meeting. This is a great troubleshooting opportunity!

Assignment: November Project

Part of the November program will look at ways to change the color of an item in an image, from subtle hue shifts to complete color changes. The assignment for this month’s meeting is to download the garden photo from the PSIG website and change the color of the flower in the image. For an added challenge, change the yellow in the butterfly’s wings as well. Bring your final image to the meeting and be prepared to say a little about what you did. Materials can also be e-mailed to Matt ahead of time.

Changing Colors…

As a jump start for the November assignment, check out the tutorial originally explored at a recent DCSIG meeting. Visit the Designs by Mark website, scroll down to the sample QuickTime tutorials, and you will see the “Change Color in an Image” movie. No matter what method you choose to change your colors, this tutorial is worth checking out.

Tips and Tricks

More Accurate Color with Replace Color

When using “replace color” to select an area within your photo and replace it with a different color, the new color is an approximation, because you are dragging sliders, rather than putting in an exact value. While this is OK sometimes, in Photoshop CS there is a way around this. Once you have selected the area of color you want to replace, click on the color swatch to the right of the sliders in the replacement section, which brings up the color picker, and you can enter the exact RGB or CMYK values.

Expanding Rectangular Selections

If you have ever tried to expand a rectangular selection by more than five or six pixels (Select > Modify > Expand) the crisp, sharp-edged corners become rounded. Here’s the fix: first, make your selection and press Command-T to bring up the Free Transform bounding box. Go up to the Options bar and Control-click in the Width and Height fields to change the measurements from percent to pixels. Now, simply add the amount of pixels you want to expand to the existing number.

Greater Sharpening Control

For a different type of sharpening, use Filter > Other > High Pass on a duplicate of the layer that you want to sharpen. Then, change the layer’s Blend Mode to Overlay, Soft Light, or Hard light. Smaller High Pass settings emphasize tiny details in the image where you need to keep the tiny details (such as wrinkles) unsharpened. You can then reduce the opacity of the sharpening layer along with masked areas for precise control and extreme flexibility.